[pizza]

JPEG is good for when you want a picture to look reasonably good while throwing away ~90-95% of the data. In fact, there's a relatively new JPEG variant that lets you get even better psychovisual fidelity for the same compression level by just doing JPEG in the XYB color space, xybjpeg. JPEG is also a very simple algorithm, when compared to the ones that'd be noticeably better near 99% compression.

To beat blockiness/banding across very gradually varying color gradients (think eg the gradient of a blue sky), JPEG XL has to whip out a lot of tricks, like handling sub-LF DCT coefficients between blocks, heterogeneous block sizes, deblocking filters for smoothing, and heterogeneous quantization maps.

BTW, one of the ways different camera manufacturers aimed to position themselves as having cameras that generated the best pictures was by using custom proprietary quantization tables to optimize for psychovisual quality.

[crazygringo]

No disagreements.

I do suspect that at some point we will make a major compression breakthrough that is based on something more "psychovisual". Not Gaussian splatting, but something more akin to that -- something that directly understands geometric areas of gradating colors as primitive objects, textures as primitives, and motion as assigned to those rather than to pixels.

On the other hand, it may very well be a form of AI-based compression that does this, rather than us explicitly designing it.